Emergent Research will be speaking at the Coworking Europe 2011 conference, on November 3rd.

For the last 6 months, Emergent Research has been partnering with MBO Partners on a deep dive research project on independent workers – freelancers, contractors, temps, solopreneurs, etc.

Among their findings, they observed that 55% of independent workers in the US say it’s their proactive choice to become independent. Relatively few (15%)
said it was entirely due to factors beyond their control (job loss,
etc.).

Based on the huge shift in values in the working world, we can assume that the trend in Europe is similar. In the Netherlands, Ronald van den Hoff, from Seats2meet (who will be a speaker at the Coworking Europe 2011 conference as well), the percentage of independent workers in the economy could jump from 9% to … 40%, in the very long term.

According to a study commissioned by Virgin Business Media, 58% of U.K. workers think the offices of today will not exist in ten years’ time (…) The survey also revealed that 56% of respondents believed that they would spend less time commuting in 2021, presumably because they believe they will spend more time working remotely.

Coworking spaces could play a important role in that shift.

“As employers search for more agile and effective ways of running their businesses, we’re increasingly finding that firms are swapping expensive office spaces in favor of a virtual workplace, where all activities can be conducted remotely”, says Virgin Business Media, quoted in this Gigaom post.

“With the advent of new communication technologies and networks on the Web 2.0, traditional work processes seem to be becoming increasingly obsolete. Crowdsourcing and Coworking are the hottest trends of the year and both are very similar in their approaches”.

“The working models of the future are no longer devised in the upper echelons of big business. They often occur among the very young in non-traditional settings. And sometimes putting this bit of “here” and “there” together leads to the same ideas and goals. We can probably describe it as a “movement” or perhaps even as a “trend”. Two of these movements that have been lurking around the creative industries for some time are crowdsourcing and coworking. They both have similar tonality and also share a common background – they represent a new way of working. In addition, they complement each other perfectly for a “Future Workplace (…)”

“(…) Both approaches – crowdsourcing and coworking – are based on the fact that people who work in virtual and physical networks can in this way create a higher value collectively than if they acted independently. This is also true for problem-solving, innovation and creative output.”